Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

Polly breaks into “ What a Wonderful World.” Playing it hard like the Ramones did, but she spit-snarls the lyrics, force-feeding us the irony of her performance. Perhaps she’s only heard the punked-out version and never consulted Satchmo. I go back to my doodling on the napkin. Nothing comes of it save for the growing apprehension that I’m about to make a complete ass of myself — standing up there without a damn thing to play.

Polly hits a last chord, yanks her guitar off, and, holding it by the neck, jams it into the amp. The sound feeds back, turning from rough and low to a high wail that makes people reach for their ears. She shakes the guitar, trying to coax more wailing, but the sound fades. Craig jumps up to keep her from continuing. He unplugs the amp and lowers it onto the floor for her. She shoulders her guitar and stands grinning at the crowd — triumphant. I don’t, however, remember hearing any applause.

“You’re up, brother,” says Mountain Man.

“Thank you.”

I begin to make my way to the front. Craig looks for then finds me in the crowd. He waves to me, causing people to look back. The nerves come — like I’ve swallowed several whole spastic moths washed down by too many cups of coffee. My guts are an ugly place, and I don’t want to know what goes on in them. I feel myself disassociate, lose focus on my insides and then what exists out in the bar. I blur the faces until I find myself at the bandstand trying to figure out how not to trip.

Polly steps off the stage and gives me a pinched grin as we pass. I catch a whiff of her hair products and dense French cigarettes — maybe some BO. “Hey, darlings!” I hear them move the furniture to make way for her.

“You need anything, man?” asks Craig, pushing the stool at me.

I go to say, “Yes, the stool,” but all I manage to do is point weakly at it. He sets it up in front of the mikes, takes another look at me, and readjusts their positions. I keep my back to the crowd, set my case down, and open it. I expect my guitar to be grounding, but it isn’t. It looks plastic, beat, incapable of resonance. I pick it up, and it feels that way, too.

I strum a chord. It’s out of tune.

“Here, dude.” Craig hands me a small device that I don’t recognize. “Clip it on to your headstock.” I do. It’s a tuner. “It’s for tuning up in noisy places.” I tune up, strum a chord to check it. It sounds tinny, but in tune.

“Thank you.”

He beams at me like he’s never heard the expression.

“Cool. Ready?”

I nod. He straightens up to the mike. “Folks, we got some new blood here tonight. Please give a warm welcome to um — let’s see. Teddy Ball-en-game.” He bends to me, whispers, “I fucked up your name, huh?”

“Close enough.”

“Give ’em hell, dude.” He bounds off the stage, letting out another rebel yell as he does. A few in the crowd reply.

I hang my harmonica around my neck, stand up, and turn around. I don’t have a strap. My legs start trembling, then my arms do, too. I remember the stool and try to drag it forward without dropping my guitar. I sit and the trembling stops, but the microphones are too low. Craig bounds back up, resets them. The crowd’s quiet now, watching. Someone snuck a capo onto my guitar, fifth fret. I blur my eyes again to avoid seeing their faces — to make them one big whole. Craig leans out of the mass and nods for me to begin.

I start, a cappella, the words like a grace note— “Lord I’m. .” —B-flat—“. . broke, I’m hungry, ragged and dirty too.” Slide up the neck for a fill — slide down. Repeat. Then, “If I clean up sweet mama can I stay all night with you?” Fill. I look up the neck at the headstock while I play, but I don’t really see anything — not the strings or my fingers, not the frets, where my hands go on the fills and changes. Even though they’re a blur, I don’t look at the audience. “You shouldn’t mistreat me baby, because I’m young and wild.”

When it’s over they clap — loudly — there are even scattered whistles. No bar noise. Perhaps it’s because I’m down here in the mix that it seems so much louder. Perhaps they actually like me. I still won’t look at them. I go right into the second song— “If You Want Me to Stay. . ” I drag it down, take whatever rhythm there was out, and drag it through the blues — my specific funk.

“Seawrack” and “seatangle.” These are the blues: coinage upon contact with the air. Traces of hope and joy from the fusion flash in my head. I like what I hear — the wordless neologisms created with voice, guitar, and air. I don’t look up, I won’t break the spell. A glance would sever the atmosphere— “seawrack” and “seatangle.” That isn’t what comes out. Strummed chords. An inexorable internal rhythm. Not a train, but something coming down the track under its own unconscious locomotion. “Seawrack” and “seatangle” —I’ve always loved those words, never knew what they were, but they behaved in my mind like multifaceted jewels — so many illuminations — so open and so bright. There is no sorrow in this room because it is filled with song— and—“Hey, Mr. Tambourine man . .”

When it’s over, they clap. Craig jumps up on stage, motions for me to stand but stay there. He waves the others up. When he has us in a line, he calls out, “Who’s got the hat?”

It gets passed up to him, a Yankee hat. It’s full of singles and change. He waves to the crowd to stop.

“Okay, y’all. You know what to do.” He moves behind Ed and Peter and waves his hands above their heads. “What do you say?” The audience responds with loud enthusiasm. “All right.” He moves behind Rosa and does the same. She gets polite but muted approval.

He jumps next to Polly, who, by the angry look on her face, has already predicted her defeat. The crowd doesn’t disappoint. He moves on to me.

“Give it up for Ted.” They yell back loudly, certainly louder than they did for the two women but around the same level of support the duo received. Craig knows. He hands me the hat. They yell and clap some more.

“Okay, people, let’s hear it. Give it up for the artists.”

There is some more applause, the loudest by Ed and Peter, who have begun moving back to their table. Polly darts off the stage. Rosa lingers on the stage with Craig and me. She leans in to say hello. Craig stops her by speaking first.

“That was a really cool set, man.” I look at his face again. It’s craggy. He’s not so young, a few miles past and many tequila shots down.

“Thank you.”

“Although that Dylan at the end threw me a bit. I thought you were going in another direction.”

“I liked it,” she steps closer. “You did it well. There’s nothing worse than a bad Dylan cover.”

“Except a Dylan original,” mumbles Craig like a teen.

She slaps his arm. “Oh stop.”

“I don’t know.” He shakes his head. “I just don’t get it about that guy.”

“There’s nothing to get,” she snaps. “That’s the whole point.”

“I’ve just heard he’s a jerk. He seems like one.”

I pack up my guitar. She watches. He watches her.

I stand, ready to go.

“Are you going to stay for a drink?” She thumbs at Ed and Peter’s table.

“Thank you, no. I have to be going.”

“Teddy?” she cranes her neck and points. I nod. She straightens quickly and throws that hair behind her. “Are you gonna be around next week?”

“I don’t think so. I’m not sure.”

“See you around.” She holds her hand up but doesn’t wave.

“Good night.”

I’m drawn to the bookstore window, how the light falls on the covers. I can’t make them out from across the street, but I know what titles they are. They’ve been there all summer. And while I can honestly say that I’ve never tried to picture my own book on display, I have imagined the window with these books gone, not no books, just not these books, although I can’t picture the ones I’d want there. I’ve been inside, spent strange late morning and twilight hours when I should have been doing God knows what but something other than skimming through pages of nonfiction that read like the liner note text for cookbooks and fiction that read like lists — random and disparate images; loose, frayed metaphors used to stitch litanies of random, mundane events together written by brick-dry white people with polished syntax, sniping at dead poets, complaining that the dead folk had lived too much — tried to do too much. And the ethnics, whoring out their otherness, pretending to be true to some alleged mother tongue or pretending that the language of the brick-dry will speak true — verisimilitude via assimilation. I get confused. They all seem to be exactly right. Their stories are so clean, so free of bafflement, stink, or cosmic funk — cosmic affliction. Their words shrink the world down, down, tapering to a point, as though they’d followed the line of a table leg down through the cellar floor to its subatomic origin, then claimed— that’s enough!